A new year and new start for Phonic Farm

On Monday 8th January 2018, the Phonic Farm team had their first board meeting of the New Year.

The aim of this meeting was to review the positives and negatives from the first business quarter and develop learnings to move forward with. After a rather lengthy discussion, the team reviewed their progress to date and started to truly realise how well they are doing. This was helped further by the finance manager counting their profits in front of them all, as you can see from the picture!

Following on from the reflection, the team got their thinking caps on to decide on a finalised product. As each student was asked to come back with 2 ideas following the Christmas break, the ideas were flowing. We had ideas ranging from mini stories relating to each of our characters, A-Z tea towels, table mats with stories on and recipe cards which could be sold with cooking utensils.

As all the ideas were good, the team struggled to decide however eventually concluded that the recipe cards were the way to go. Ideas then kept flowing on how the product could be sold. As the team had had so much success with the Christmas cookery book and cookie cutter packs the team thought they needed to continue with the cookery utensil USP. With this said, the team started to discuss what should be included ranging from cookie cutters to rolling pins, wooden spoons and spatulas. As this could have gone on forever, operations have been tasked to find out the cost price for each of these items and the expected delivery dates to enable a cost analysis to be worked out.

Whilst this discussion was undergoing, packaging was brought up. The team started by discussing a similar strategy as before which was pre-wrapped packs. This went down well but with larger items now being incorporated into the packaging, it could be difficult to produce and transport. With this, the team then had another idea which was for customers to ‘build their own packs’. This was it! The team loved it and are now in the process of discussing, based on cost price for each item, how much we can sell the items and build the packs for. This idea also allows for customers to purchase more than 1 of each item allowing for a more ‘personalised’ product.

Phonic Farm have started the year with a very productive meeting – I hope this continues! I can’t wait to see what the team have researched and the plan they have come up with.